Trouble booting up

[tgxiii]

MSI K7N2-Delta
AMD Athlon XP 2500+ Barton
2x256MB PC2700 Mushkin Basic DDR
GeForce2 MX400 64MB SDR

I turn on the computer and it goes to the POST screen (I think it's what it's called). I set the FSB to 166 and for the 1st boot device to be the CD-ROM so I can install an OS. After the POST screen, it goes to a black screen with a flashing cursor at the top left and it stays there. How do I get my computer to boot?

[HeadBand]

what os is it? is it bootable media? does the bios show the cd drive and hard drive?

[DallasDon]

The POST, power on self test, should be a dos screen with the vid card info at the top, and Press F! to enter setup at the bottom. It will halt there if no os is installed, or hard drive for that matter.

The setup is your BIOS and CMOS. Enter setup, and look at advanced cmos features. It should list the hard drive a primaty master, and cd rom as secondary master. If not, you have a jumper, cable problem.

Next step, enter Advanced bios features. Select cdrom as firts boot device. Check that it is not also listed as 2nd or 3rd. I usually disable the other boot devices until Windows is installed, then select 1st, 2nd, 2rd, and seek another device.

While you are in setup, watch the system health page for like ten minutes. CPU temp should not exceed 50 C at idle, or you have a heat sink problem, causing reboot probs later.

I find Windows installs much better with "fail safe" defaults loaded. That will probably be 100 mhz. You can then adjust it to the proper speed, after everything is up and stable.

[RicheemxX]

tech talk squash that...basically your cd isn't beind read so either your not placing cdrom as first boot or the cd isn't bootable if you wanna pm me and i'll shoot you through it our you can pm me and i'll talk you throughh it or pm me and i'll call ya and walk you through it

[RicheemxX]

same issue as here ??? http://www.techimo.com/forum/t93502.html just keep the questions in one thread and we might be able to hel you quicker

[tgxiii]

Actually, I set the first boot as CD-ROM.

I checked the CMOS. It has my hard drive set as primary master and no primary slave device, and my CD-RW as my secondary master and my CD-ROM as my secondary slave, exactly as I have it set up.

RicheemxX, that problem has actually been resolved already. I got the computer to stay turned on. This is a new problem and I thought I'd get more responses if I started a new thread.

[paul9]

i had been playing with bootable cd's and i found this.
under the section where you set your hard drive and cdrom types (in the bios) only set up your hard drive and the cdrom you will have the boot disk in. have the other devices set as NOT INSTALLED. the operating system will still see them okay, but some systems will not boot from cd with more than one cdrom set in the bios. this has caused me lots of trouble in the past but not any more.

[tgxiii]

I finally got it to boot off the CD. I set the FSB jumpers to 100 and with that setting it worked.

My problem now is:
After the screen that says "Setup is inspecting your hardware" or something like that, it goes to a screen saying

"Line 17711 of the INF file \i386\txtsetup.sif is invalid.

Setup cannot continue. Press any key to exit."

This is the same Windows XP Pro CD I used for the same hard drive. To check, I borrowed a neighbor's Windows XP Home CD and it said the same thing.

I don't have the hard drive formatted. I was going to use the WinXP CD to format it. Anyone know what's wrong?

[tgxiii]

Out of curiousity, I booted off the CD on one of my computers and it worked fine. It must be one of my hardware and not the CD itself.

[tgxiii]

I can't return the CPU so tomorrow I'm returning the mobo. If anyone has any ideas for me to try out before returning the board tmw, it would be greatly appreciated.